The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  THE CAR STOPPED—they were in the Village. “This okay?”

  “Where are we?” She’d once lived here, but had lost her way.

  “Seventh and Bleecker.”

  “Sure, fine—”

  And then of course she had to pay—did she have enough? She’d forgotten that, hadn’t thought to ask the price. She’d somehow assumed that even this ride from another world was included.

  And now he could hold her up, but he asked thirty dollars, which seemed reasonable, and she had the cash, and paid him, and watched for a minute as the car turned off to head back. It wasn’t a bad life over there—Klara’s daughter-in-law’s children all lived around her. Some worked for her husband, some were still in school, some were already devoting their lives to finding the one letter in an obscure text that held all of life’s secrets, but just down the street.

  Whereas her own children lived far away.

  What is life? she wondered.

  She walked along Seventh Avenue and turned down West Fourth. She used to live on this street, used to walk every day on these same cracked pavements, under these same trees, much bigger now—another miracle. There’d been a Japanese woman at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market selling purple plums last season. “Italian plums,” said the little placard. They were ridiculously expensive but she’d bought them anyway.

  You couldn’t split them like her grandfather’s, but they were very good. So good that she hoarded them, until they got too soft to eat, and then she cooked them and watched as they turned from purple to dark magenta. They were having people to dinner that night—she’d serve them with vanilla ice cream.

  But in the end, she couldn’t do it. She’d tasted them, and they were sublime, deep and sweet and a little bit bitter, like nothing else in the world, and she couldn’t bring herself to share them. Maybe in the light of day, with one or two friends who would pause over the color. But no one would be able to see it in the candlelight, or at least not without ceremony and a certain ado. And could she ask the young Hollywood producers her husband was courting to cry over purple plums?

  She realized as she walked her old streets that it could have been worse with Klara, much worse. If she’d found her ten years earlier, “before her stroke.” Klara would have shaken her head sadly and revised her testimony, the way witnesses do, in the light of new evidence. Hermann never came back, so therefore, in retrospect, she and her sister Alice had never seen him. He wasn’t in Auschwitz with them after all, nor was he “still healthy and strong.”

  But as it was, the good news still stood. For what it was worth, because the truth now was that though she had taken much trouble to save Hermann from the gas and preserve him as a hero, she found she no longer cared about that.

  Because she’d come to see them all as heroes, and had also learned that how one dies might not matter. That all deaths might carry within themselves their own escape, touched, possibly, with light, with something freeing. That what we see is only the external, nothing to do with what is happening inside. That a man screaming for air in the gas might be singing “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” That a child thrown alive to burn in a Nazi pit could be smiling in its own mother’s arms.

  SHE REMEMBERED the last time she’d seen Magda, about five years ago, not long before she died. The old people, “Uncle and Auntie,” were long gone, but Magda had few cousins, and she made the journey to California to see Consie and her mother, and once there, had taught them to make crêpes suzette. She had learned, she said, in Vienna, where they called them something else, but “it’s all the same!”

  She laughed—“Vienna!” Shook her head. Consie didn’t know then to ask her any questions, just took her down to the sea, and they walked slowly along the sand, into the sun. It was one of those golden evenings, like nowhere but California. There could have been nothing there to summon Magda’s old world.

  Still, she smiled and mentioned how her father had loved “bathing,” and taught her to swim when she was very small. He had a navy blue “bathing costume, or svimsuit as you say.”

  Consie smiled. The w’s. The v’s.

  “And he bought me one, like his—navy blue too, which I loved, and we svam in the little pond by the orchard. It was the end of the day, and the sun came over the water.”

  And now, looking back, she saw another way to make peace with Magda’s Hermann. Not only as a hero, but as a man who had loved, deeply. A good father who’d bought his daughter a blue bathing “costume” and taught her to swim.

  “And it seemed to me so big, that pond—” Magda had continued, then broken off. A silence. “Of course, he would be dead by now, anyway.”

  Long dead—all of them, almost everyone the Nazis had killed, certainly all the old ones, and by now, most of the young ones too. Magda herself was in her eighties that day, as was her sister Gabi. They lived near each other in Toronto. The youngest sister, Vera, had died in her forties, of what they called natural causes.

  Consie had walked on with Magda in silence. The waves broke on the beach, the shorebirds ran forward and back, pecking the sand crabs. The “corps de ballet,” as she called the sanderlings, swept in and out together.

  All life was a mystery, but Magda’s was touched with something else, and the light that afternoon had come off her head like a halo in a quattrocento painting of the saints and angels. She and Consie had turned and smiled at each other, and then walked slowly in their silence, back, away from the sun now, into the blue.

  CONSIE WENT BACK to the small hotel in the Village where she was staying and dreamed that night of the camps—some version of the camps, with death in the offing. In the dream, there were many men, great men, Freud, Jung, friends, others, all threatened with imminent murder. But three gray cats came in, to lead them to freedom. Not to safety, she remembered knowing, but at least out.

  They were beautiful cats—when she awoke, she remembered the gray cats of Freya, the Norse goddess. The Norse myths were different from the Greeks’, or for that matter, the Hebrews’. Harsher, with their storm gods, and evil elves, and in the end, all-out destruction, as Hitler should have known from the start.

  But there was beauty, too, stark and stirring—that whiff of cold, fresh air, clean from the mountains, and the horns, the bells, the music in the wind. The gods drank their mead, and you could hear them forging magic tools in their caves, hear their hammers ringing through the mountains. Sometimes they unleashed terrible storms on the world, but Freya was beautiful and, come spring, Heimdall would blow his magic horn, and then men—yes, Hitler, men like Hermann—could come out again and plant their plum trees in the sun.

  O fim

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FIRST, I SHOULD LIKE to acknowledge the witnesses whom I was lucky enough to hear tell their stories, at great cost to their own peace and comfort, at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, in 2009–10. They were mostly old then; many of them are no longer with us. But a few remain, and in tribute, I will say that if you ever have a chance to hear one of them speak, run, fly, ride, speed-walk to wherever place on this earth that they are still gracing. Like Magda, they have been touched by the angel. The light comes off them, and you will find yourself in awe.

  I also thank Dr. Crispin Brooks and the Shoah Foundation at USC, where, thanks to the vision and generosity of Steven Spielberg, a whole archive of testimony exists for anyone to access.

  As for my editor at W. W. Norton, Starling Lawrence, as I was filling this page with words of praise and gratitude, I suddenly heard his voice, his dread: “Must we?” So rather than presuming and beginning, I shall simply say thank you. But moltissimo. Muito. Very, very much.

  Many thanks as well to Nneoma Amadi-obi, also at Norton.

  And last as always, first as ever, to J.P.

  NOTES

  THE LETTER

  35 “. . . our radio, our government”: Otto Friedrich, City of Nets (Harper & Row, 1986), 51.

  55 “they don’t treat people like this for nothing”: Incident
from Hélène Berr, The Journal of Helene Berr (McClelland & Stewart, 2008).

  58 through the deep Polish woods: Mike Popeck, testimony, Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2009.

  68 at least nothing with pictures: Marthë Kardos, private conversation, São Paulo, Brazil, 1985.

  78 Wotan, had thundered through the land: See Carl Jung’s essay “Wotan,” Essays on Contemporary Events (Princeton University Press/Bollingen, 1989).

  81 people were eating stinging nettles: Irene Firestone, testimony, Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2009.

  82 that it had a lid: Agnès Humbert, Résistance: A French Woman’s Journal of the War (Bloomsbury, 2008).

  84 “. . . Russian edifice will come tumbling down”: Quoted by Peter De Mendelssohn, Design for Aggression: The Inside Story of Hitler’s War Plans (Harper & Brothers, 1946).

  84 Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony: Ed Vulliamy, “Orchestral Maneouvres (Part Two),” Observer, November 25, 2001.

  88 rather than to minor Hungarians: On the fate of the Weiss steel mills, see Cathy Weiss, testimony, Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2009.

  89 just laughed and walked away: George Konrád, “The Crown Prince of Frivolity,” excerpt from A Feast in the Garden, translated by Imre Goldstein (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).

  “THE WITCH’S KITCHEN”

  97 when the train stopped: Godel Silber, interview no. 2226, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  100 “My mother!”: Arrival accounts from Magda Ruzohorsky, Elisabeth Mann, Mike Popeck, etc.

  100 “. . . Neither food nor water was plentiful”: Oliver Lustig, text presentation of photographs from The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport, Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project, “Forget You Not,” http://isurvived.org/Survivors_Folder/Lustig_Oliver/Commentary-PhotoAlbum-1.html.

  101 “. . . Germans are barbarians, madame?”: Rudolf Vrba, I Escaped from Auschwitz (Grove Press/Black Cat, 1986).

  107 took out his gun and shot her: Klara Aardwerk, interview no. 67515, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  112 “. . . maybe they won’t cut it”: Cathy Weiss, testimony.

  115 “. . . your parents, your children, your friends”: Ibid.

  121 “death” here . . . “can start with the shoes”: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, translated by Stuart Woolf (Simon & Schuster, 1995).

  123 like an old woman’s with the palsy: Mary Nata, testimony, Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2009.

  126 like crazy women: Terrence Des Pres in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Indiana University Press, 1994), 130.

  128 “. . . and it just hurts you”: Irene Zisblatt, interview no. 7832, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  130 Shakespeare’s sonnets: Lidia Rosenfeld Vago, “One Year in the Black Hole of Our Planet Earth: A Personal Narrative,” in Women in the Holocaust, edited by Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (Yale University Press, 1998).

  138 quickly shut the door again: Sophia Litwinska, from the Belsen trial, September 1945.

  140 large number of baby carriages: Accounts of Guiliana Tedeschi and Danuta Czech, quoted in Richard L. Rubinstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 239.

  144 his uniform splattered with blood: Edith Singer, testimony, Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2009.

  147 to fill his slots: Edith Singer, March to Freedom: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Impact Publishing, 2008), 61–62.

  151 extremely painful: Vago, “One Year in the Black Hole of Our Planet Earth.”

  THE PINK TULIP

  165 behind them as they went: Marie Glasser, testimony, Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2009.

  173 years ago from Prague: Joel Sayre, “Letter from Berlin,” The New Yorker, July 28, 1945.

  178 . . . reap the whirlwind : Hosea 8:7.

  182 “. . . in vain anyway”: Mado from Chalotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (Yale University Press, 1995), quoted by Lawrence L. Langer in “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” in Ofer and Weitzman, Women in the Holocaust.

  182 all they had: Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin (Picador, 2005).

  182 simple chance: Langer, “Gendered Suffering?,” 245.

  183 “. . . no one knows it” : Ibid.

  183 he’d laughed: Ibid., 356.

  ”FOR NOTHING IS RESOLVED, NOTHING IS SETTLED . . .”

  193 “but not unknown ”: Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz (Harper & Row, 1982).

  194 “. . . tremendous hope ” : Ibid.

  194 not far from the Czech border: Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.

  198 “. . . holding their little hands, five in a row ”: Chaim Feig, interview no. 34315, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  203 instead of being turned into gloves: Irene Zisblatt, interview no. 7832, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  209 “. . . Don’t let them take you alive ”: Vrba, I Escaped from Auschwitz, 214.

  213 it was a clean ninety-five percent: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Viking Press, 1963), 125.

  216 “. . . an ideal Gestapo officer himself ”: Eichmann interview, Life 49, no. 22 (November 28, 1960).

  220 in the French film Shoah : Shoah, documentary by Claude Lanzmann (New Yorker Films, 1985).

  224 “. . . No trace of them will remain ”: Zalmen Gradowski, From the Heart of Hell: Manuscripts of a Sonderkommando Prisoner, Found in Auschwitz, quoted in Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 482.

  225 seized and sent to Auschwitz: Morris Venezia, interview no. 20405, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  229 “no one dreamt of escaping ”: Charlotte Delbo, None of Us Will Return (Grove Press, 1968).

  230 “. . . Hell is my home ”: Nathan Cohen, “Diaries of the SK,” in Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.

  233 to effectuate these duties: Kitty Hart-Moxon, interview no. 45132, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  233 in oxygen cans with acetylene: Godel Silber, interview.

  233 the Poles stalling for more weapons: Morris Venezia, interview.

  234 and struck him with a hammer: Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).

  235 The crematorium burst into flames: Dario Gabbai, interview no. 142, Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation Institute.

  237 just as they hung her: Gutman and Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, 157.

  237 “. . . until the day of liberation ” : Ibid.

  238 “. . . be placed in the files of history ”: Jean Améry, 1976 preface to At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, translated by Sidney and Stella Rosenfield (Indiana University Press, 1980).

  “. . . BUT MAYBE A THREAD”

  249 “. . . beyond rationality and irrationality . . . a ‘reckoning’ ”: Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (Harper Perennial, 1992), 16.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Translated by Sidney and Stella Rosenfield. Indiana University Press, 1980.

  Anonymous. A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City: A Diary. Picador, 2005.

  Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.

  Berr, Hélène. The Journal of Hélène Berr. Translated by David Bellos with notes by the translator and an afterword by Mariette Job. McClelland & Stewart, 2008.

  Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Penguin Books, 1967.

  Delbo, Charlotte. None of Us Will Return. Grove Press, 1968.

  —. Auschwitz and After. Yale University Press, 1995.<
br />
  De Mendelssohn, Peter. Design for Aggression: The Inside Story of Hitler’s War Plans. Harper & Brothers, 1946.

  Friedrich, Otto. The Kingdom of Auschwitz. Harper & Row, 1982.

  —. City of Nets. Harper & Row, 1986.

  Gutman, Yisrael, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Indiana University Press, 1994.

  Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. Harper Perennial, 1992.

  Höcker Album. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  Humbert, Agnès. Résistance: A French Woman’s Journal of the War. Bloomsbury, 2008.

  Jung, Carl. “Wotan.” Essays on Contemporary Events. Princeton University Press/Bollingen, 1989.

  Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah. New Yorker Films, 1985.

  Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Abacus, 1989.

  —. Survival in Auschwitz. Translated by Stuart Woolf. Simon & Schuster, 1995.

  —. The Periodic Table. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Schocken, 1995.

  Müller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

  Ofer, Dalia, and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds. Women in the Holocaust. Yale University Press, 1998. See esp. Lawrence L. Langer, “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” and Lidia Rosenfeld Vago, “One Year in the Black Hole of Our Planet Earth: A Personal Narrative.”

  Rubenstein, Richard L., and John K. Roth. Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and Its Legacy. Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.

  Vrba, Rudolf. I Escaped from Auschwitz. Grove Press/Black Cat, 1986.

  ALSO BY VICTORIA SHORR

  Midnight: Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning

  Backlands: A Novel

  The Plum Trees is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.